Ex-Windows Phone exec joins Amazon, may be working on smartphone

Charlie Kindel will work on 'something secret'

Former Windows Phone General Manager Charlie Kindel revealed that Amazon, the company that sells the Kindle, brought him onboard today, which sounded like yet another April Fools' prank.

However, the only April 1-related joke was that he and the company were making a home server product called the "Amazon Kindle Charlie."

The home server is fictitious, but the experience that Kindel can bring to the online retailer is not.

At Microsoft, he was the driving force behind Windows Home Server and the Windows Phone 7 application platform and developer experience.

"Depending on your perspective you can either blame me or thank me for a large part of ActiveX," Kindel lightheartedly stated on his Google+ profile.

'Something secret' at Amazon

Although Kindel was in the joking mood about his move to Amazon, he was serious about keeping his future plans at the company top-secret.

"I'm building a new team going after a totally new area for Amazon. I'm hiring cloud and mobile developers and testers, program managers, and product managers," he wrote on his LinkedIn profile, according to GeekWire.